Greeting Hails

[Grsartor at AOL.COM]

Herewith, something of a ragbag of what I am able to  contribute to 
answering questions raised in recent posts.
 
About the interpretation of the "hail" constructions attested  in Gothic: I 
would take "thiudan" to be vocative (o King) in
 
Hails thiudan - [be] hale o King
 
The alternative version with "thiudans" is trickier; it may be  due to 
miscopying or looseness of usage.
 
About the word order in
 
thiudiskaland thiudangardi ist: it might be worth while to  look for some 
examples in Wulfila, but bear in mind that he tends to stick  closely to the 
Greek he translates.
 
About how to say "how are you?". Gothic appears to have had a  phrase "ubil 
haban" (to have evil) or "ubilaba haban" (to have badly) for saying  "to be 
ill". But these look like very literal translations of the New  Testament's 
Greek (kakos echein = to have badly) and so we perhaps ought not to  be too 
eager to postulate a Gothic phrase literally meaning "how do you have?".  
On the other hand, just such an expression for "how are you" is used in  
Norwegian: hvordan har du det, which I think means "how do you have  it?"
 
In answer to one other question, about the use of is/was +  participle: 
other European tongues than English seem to have sensibly avoided  this curse, 
but it does occur in Gothic, e.g. in Mark 1:21
 
was laisjands ins swe waldufni habands jah ni swaswe thai  bokarjos - he 
taught them (literally was teaching them) as one having authority  and not 
like the scribes.
 
However, Wulfila's Gothic here, as often, is a very literal  rendition of 
the original; Mark's Greek has the same construction. Unfortunately  I am not 
well versed enough in Greek to say how Mark's "was teaching" (en  didaskon) 
would have been felt to differ from a simple imperfect.
 
At a guess, the Goths did not normally use the construction in  question.
 

Gerry T.
 
 
 
 
In a message dated 01/06/2012 16:30:10 GMT Daylight Time,  
becareful_icanseeyourfuture at hotmail.de writes:


Hailai,
on our website www.vereindergotischensprache.de I  want to start a 
neogothic language course. And it's pretty difficult to invent  konversational 
phrases, the bible is not really known to have such ones  attested. ;) I now 
choosed the declined forms. They can't be wrong and as far  as I see we won't 
come to a real solution on this. And maybe some of the  possibilities are 
right. On older Gothic the forms could have been declined  and in later times 
the declination could have been reduced. 

Another  question is: How would you translate the phrase: How are you? 
According to  most languages I choosed: Hvaiwa is þu?
Would that be  appropriate?

To: gothic-l at yahoogroups.com
From:  r_scherp at yahoo.com
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2012 03:00:02 +0000
Subject:  [gothic-l] Re: Greeting  Hails




























Hails!



Well, the opinions  vary. I think we also have to distinguish between 
adjective and noun. In  'Verit heilir' the word clearly appears as an adjective. 
In German, however,  'Heil' seems to be used primarily as a noun that calls 
for the dative: 'Heil  dir'. The examples Gerry posted seem to indicate a 
similar usage, but with an  accusative instead of dative. Is that a valid  
interpretation?



Randulfs

--- In  gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, Thomas Ruhm <thomas at ...>  wrote:

>

> In other languages greetings and other  frequently used expressions with 
not much meaning the singular can be  generalized.

>


















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